Twenty-Two

Jesse spent most of the afternoon in his office with Healy, going through Charlie Farrell’s call records. Jesse still couldn’t believe, after all these years and the times when he’d done work like this before on a case, that you could do it without the phone in your possession, just knowing the number. You could, though. They did. Incoming and outgoing calls.

They did the same with incoming and outgoing calls from his landline. Normally you needed a subpoena for landlines. Jesse could still remember the hoops through which he’d had to jump with Mayor Neil O’Hara’s home phone after what appeared to be his suicide turned out to be murder. This time the district attorney’s office went along with the request, even though the request for Jack Carlisle’s phone records was still swimming upstream through the system. It was an election year for Ellis Munroe, and the victim was Charlie Farrell, an even more beloved figure in the town than Neil had been. When Munroe had briefly hesitated, going through the motions of citing the precedent of the O’Hara case, Jesse had mentioned that if Munroe tried to slow-walk him this time, he was going to read about it in the Crier.

“You remember a time when all detective work didn’t run through somebody’s goddamn phone?” Healy asked Jesse now. “Before people started turning phones on us like they were guns?”

“Does make the work easier sometimes, you gotta admit,” Jesse said. “Gives you a better road map than GPS.”

Healy looked at him over his reading glasses. “You feel that way right now with all these fake numbers?”

“There’s even an app now that helps you create fake numbers,” Jesse said.

“Technology,” Healy said. “Truly such a freaking joy.”

Jesse took off his own reading glasses, placing them on the spreadsheet in front of him. “You like cop work better when you and Charlie were young? Or with all the bells and whistles we got going with the technology now?”

“Like you keep saying,” Healy said. “I’ll take all the help we can get.”

“Charlie used to say that the only time he was interested in an app is when it was short for appetizer.”

Every time they thought they might have a lead, it would quickly turn into a dead end. They either couldn’t place a call to a number or would find out it belonged to a dry-cleaning store in Marshport, or Salem, and had simply been ghosted. Perfect, Jesse thought, just because he and Healy felt like they were chasing ghosts.

They stayed at it until six o’clock. After that Jesse took Healy over to the Gull and bought him a lobster dinner. When they were finished they toasted Charlie, Healy with a Jack Daniel’s, Jesse with iced tea. He always found it fascinating how tea so closely resembled the color of the booze, even if only one could try to ruin your fucking life.

Jesse drove home, called Nellie, got her voicemail, left a message for her to call if she’d come up with anything interesting across her day. Molly called and said that she and Suit had gotten nothing at all interesting out of the Paradise High baseball team, nothing they hadn’t heard before, the players’ answers almost sounding rehearsed.

Tonight Jesse managed to make it through the entire Red Sox game, even though it turned into one of those four-hour, nine-inning jobs that tried to challenge, mightily, his love for the game.

When it finally ended, and to his great surprise, he was still wide awake.

So he got his gun, the keys to the Explorer, put on a relax cap that Sunny had given him as a joke, then did the same thing he’d done one time already this week.

Took a ride over to Charlie Farrell’s house.

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